Cilium Now Speaks gRPC!

The Cilium team is happy to announce tech preview support for gRPC-aware filtering!

While the majority of existing API-based services leverage HTTP REST as their primary protocol for inter-service communication, among teams designing new platforms from scratch, gRPC is quickly gaining steam. gRPC is based on Google's popular protobuf project, which provides a more compact and efficiently serializable RPC payload.

Microservices written using gRPC typically include a large number of RPC "methods", all of which are exposed on a single TCP port belonging to the gRPC server. As a result, a traditional network firewall would either open or close the port of the gRPC server, exposing either all or none of the gRPC methods for a service to each RPC client. However, Cilium's API-aware filtering enables fine-grain security policies that selectively expose RPC methods to different remote callers, eliminating unnecessary attack surface.

We have created a Cilium + gRPC "Getting Started Guide" so you can try it out yourself: http://docs.cilium.io/en/stable/gettingstarted/grpc/ . Building on our tradition of Star Wars-themed demos, this guide explains how the lack of gRPC-aware network security helped the rebels escape from Cloud City during "The Empire Strikes Back". Check out the video!